Sewing

When the Great British Sewing Bee started showing again in the Springtime, i was so excited – i love that program! I hardly watch TV at all, but this is always a MUST! And as always, it can be so inspiring! It wasn’t long before my trusty machine came out for a little play!

I picked up some super cute apple print fabric a while back, and so i decided i wanted to use this for the dress – along with some grey fabric. (Don’t tell anyone, but the grey fabric is actually offcuts from our bedroom curtains….sshhhh!)

As I am an idiot and have never followed a pattern before, i decided to wing it. I drew around one of piper’s tops to get a rough guide for the size of a 3 year old torso. Here’s the first stage of the project- can you see i lined the inside with plain red fabric?

I hadn’t ever really tried pleating, so i though, what the heck- lets give this a go! It was lots of fun! For the back i put in a white zip- i was so in love with the project i had to hand sew the zip – i wasn’t prepared to chance a whoopsie at that stage – but i made sure it fit into a pleat so when it is zipped you cannot see the white zip at all!

I wanted to line the skirt with red and give it a little peek-a-boo tulle lining, but i didn’t have enough red fabric. Instead i cut a long length of red fabric about 3.5inches wide, sewed some tulle to it, and the stitched it to the underneath of the dress. Once again for this bit i actually hand sewed it – the grey fabric would show every pin hole otherwise.

Here it is! the final piece – i even put together a little headband made from scraps. One thing i am particularly pleased about is the top stitching on the apple print section – it makes the dress so pretty and keeps all the pieces in shape. Happy Mummy!

The best thing about this dress?….the best thing EVER is that Piper wore it for her Birthday Photo shoot, by the enormously talented Elizabeth Boyle. Boy do i love her work! There were so many photos to choose from but here are a few of my favs! Take a look!

It was a Sunday and it was sunny so we finally decided to make a start on the garden. After a quick trip to the garden centre we were ready to roll. Piper was eager to get stuck in, but then we realised that we didn’t have a sun hat for little miss P. Even with factor 50, I wasn’t prepared to take any risks. Hhhmmm, what to do?

Here’s what – grab an old pair of pre-pregnancy PJs that no longer fit and use the material to fashion a sun hat!

I wasn’t aiming for perfection, I was aiming for an ‘any old thing that will stay on her head and protect her from the sun’. And to be honest, that’s what I got. My original plan was to just throw it away but I thought I would have a go at rescuing it and I am happy I tried – I am delighted with the final result!

Here’s how it came together: I cut the fabric into four squares and then measured Pipers head. I lay the fabric on the cutting mat at an angle so it looked like a diamond and then i drew a bell shape onto the fabric. Two things to note: instead of a curved top I kept a point- the idea being that when i sewed them all together the four (roughly) 90 degree angles would come together, and secondly- the width of the bell was slightly more than 1/4 of the circumference of P’s noggin. Once I had one bell shape cut out, I folded it in half and trimmed it down so it was symmetrical and then I cut all four pieces to the identical shape.

Whiirrrrrr, whirrrrrrrr, whirrrrrrrr! After about three minutes I had sewn all the seams and created a shape that resembled a hat. I didn’t even stop to change the purple tread in the sewing machine. It stayed on and did the job.

The next day I traced around the bell shape and cut four more panels using a floral fabric, stitched them together to create a hat shape. Then, when I had more time I carefully pinned the two hats right-sides together and stitched along the seam, leaving a 2 inch gap. Once i turned it the right way round I top stitched in purple along the edge. This made the whole thing a lot more sturdy and also means that we now have a reversible sun hat!

Bonjour tout le monde! I’m trying to get in to a French mood because in a mere few days we will be enjoying the snowy peaks of the French Mountains! Woohoo, Roll On Holiday! I have now entered into packing mode!

Last year I shared my Emergency Craft Kit with you, a collection of goodies to pack in your suitcase when you want to craft on the go. It worked well for our domestic trip but this time we are really stuck for room, so there was no way we would be able to take up valuable suitcase space with that much stuff. Plus, we wont have as much free time, so lets be reasonable. I had to get creative about what to bring. And I do love being creative….

I remember seeing a post on the beautiful blog of Crafty Goddess Elizabeth Kartchner, where she had packed some crafty supplies for a road trip. I loved it, be sure to check it out. This was the inspiration for my (mini) Emergency Craft Kit! Let’s take a look at what i’ve got!

Mini Book

Elizabeth made a little book from kraft cardstock and her silhouette and it was adorable. I thought I would follow suit to see what I could come up with. From an A4 piece of card I made pages with word apertures, cut out using the BEBAS font. I love the way this font looks when you cut it out.

I too used the bind it all to bind all the pages together, but I mixed it up a little in two ways. Firstly I used black wire as well as silver wire for the bindings. This is a cool way to use up those offcuts when you use all but two or three prongs. Secondly I added some extra pages to the book: a piece of glitter card to go behind the cover page, a pocket page for ephemera and I also glued two pages together to create the last page in the book (with some washi tape behind the aperture) – this makes it more sturdy, and hopefully more voyage-friendly!

Supplies

As for supplies, I too wanted to bring some washi tape, small scissors and some tags and journaling cards. I also brought some offcuts of pattern paper from my scraps box.

For adhesive, I really wish that I had the small bottle of glossy accents but i’m not going to buy it just for this trip so instead I am bringing this white glue pen. It is basically PVA glue but is it super easy to dispense. I have wrapped some sticky tape around the lid to ensure no mishaps on our travels.

In regards to pens, I’ve got a standard black pen that I like to write with and a white gel pen. I have wrapped these up in some discarded craft packaging incase of ink spills. It pays to be careful!

I also took a little baggy and put in a sprinkling of embellishments: buttons, veneer shapes, chipboard shapes. In fact Piper spent about half an hour sorting these this afternoon, so these may also double up as an indoor play project with miss P. BONUS!

All together

To contain her bits and pieces, Elizabeth had a little fabric bag. I never even thought of doing something like that. I guess I would have worried about getting things crumpled, but throwing caution to the wind I figured I would give it a try. Its good to get outside your comfort box sometimes.

I took some fabric and cut two rectangles, and before sewing them together I wanted to decorate the front of my bag. For this I used felt letters from KI memories, spelling out ECK – Emergency Craft Kit of course!! The felt letters have a cardboard backing and are adhesive but I didn’t think the adhesive would endure the ride so I ran some stitches through them. I love how they turned out. Not sure who makes the felt heart, but I stitched this by hand onto the material.

A few minutes later I had a bag, and all it needed was a drawstring – seam binding worked great for this! TA-DA!

Do you like it? Its a trash bag for the car! You see, I am a self confessed messy car owner. In fact, my husband would say I am a messy car creator! He is always going on about how my car is full of rubbish. Meh. It doesnt bother me at all. The car […]